Page:Stella Dallas, a novel (IA stelladallasnove00prou).pdf/12

2 ways the shoes and stockings, ribbons, hats, sweaters, and what-not harmonized with her various linens, pastel-shaded Japanese crêpes, organdies, or hand-embroidered serges for cool days.

"That Dallas woman must spend about all her time over that child's clothes," Laurel had one day overheard from behind the high back of one of the hotel-piazza rocking-chairs.

Laurel was sitting by an open window in an empty cardroom just behind the chairs. Laurel liked to sit and listen to what the women talked about on the other side of that high cane wall of chair-backs. Sometimes, however, she heard things that made her grave, contemplative eyes still graver and still more contemplative. There had been scorn in the voice which had referred to her mother.

"I wonder," she thought, "if we didn't dress quite so well, people mightn't be nicer."

She waited for more enlightening remarks from behind the chair-backs, but none were forthcoming, so she rose, sauntered out of the cardroom, wandered down a long deserted corridor, and drifted into the hotel foyer.

She was tall for thirteen, with long slim legs, long slim arms, and a long slim body. "Nice eyes, kiddie, but you'd make mighty poor eating," one of the habitués of the poolroom had said to Laurel one day, as she stood staring at the clicking balls on the bright green felt, and he had pinched one of Laurel's pipestem arms—bare from the elbow down, and brown now to her finger-tips.

Laurel did have nice eyes. They were gray eyes, set well apart. They had long, well-defined